MARK SHECHNER
537
she is beautiful and knows only one love-of terror and reckless action." But
usually there was little to his Jewishness of romance , though the distant
beauty of the Yevgenia Borisovnas remained , transformed from an image of
unrequited passion into a measure of inner distances. His fiction and criti–
cism alike are haunted by phantom mothers, vanishing or untouchable
women, and vacancies of the heart, or the mouth, or the bowels.
An essay on
The Rise a/DavidLevinsky
and one on the Jewish culinary
obsession and the mysteries of
kashruth
entitled" Adam and Eve on Delancy
Street" were examinations of that empty center, the insatiable hunger that
Rosenfeld identified as the source of his alienation . Rosenfeld was a dialecti–
cian of food and despair, the first literary intellectual to turn the psycho–
analytic connection between hunger and culture , loneliness and success, to
critical use. The Kosher laws, he observed , are symbolic sexual taboos , and
the ritual prohibition against eating meat with milk really an insurance
policy against sexual transgression-no mixing allowed! Similarly, the Jewish
insistence upon eating is so much displacement, a simulated hunger that
cannot be satisfied because it is not real but has to be patronized by generous
offerings of food . He called it "the hunger that was not a hunger." This
insight was seized upon some years later by Philip Roth who elaborated it
into the wild alimentary politics of
Portnoy 's Complaint,
where food em–
braces a universe of sexual delicacies and moral discriminations. The essay
on
The Rise a/DavidLevinsky
struck a more complicated and somber version
of that note. The hunger is not only insatiable, Rosenfeld claimed there, but
is itself the object of desire .
Thus Levinsky is a man who cannot feel at home with his desires. Be–
cause hunger is so strong in him, he must always strive
to
relieve it; but
precisely because it is strong, it has to be preserved . It owes its strength
to the fact that for so many years everything that influenced Levinsky
most deeply-say, piety and mother love-was inseparable from it.
Or, as he epitomized it in a phrase, "The hunger must be preserved at all
cost."
That is as fine an insight into Levinsky's character as, typically, was
available to Rosenfeld: where insight followed self-analysis and his own
troubled nature was the clue to the interpretation. Witness his own dogged
resistance to satisfaction and his dedication to preserving the hunger at all
costs. " All his life, " he says of this stand-in Levinsky, "he is at loose ends,
and expert only in ennui, which Tolstoy defined as the desire for desire,
cousin to his yearning.' ,
Where emptiness and depression are the nightmare, fullness and vitality
are the dream, and Rosenfeld knew the one as intimately as the other.
